It's easier saying “Life sucks” than admitting is my life, not necessarily life in general, doing the sucking. That's where self-bias breeds; everyone is on denial. Their survival would be at stake if that mechanism were not in place.
It's just as well easier to blame the job, relatives, friends or your coworkers for what's really going on within. No situation can be remedied from the standpoint of the observer. We need to extricate ourselves from the equation. Instead of looking at it from the outsider angle, feel it in your gut that it seethes beneath the flesh like an ancient sacrificial cry echoing across timeless lands. Perhaps all of that which surrounds us and makes our daily routines was only created so that our eyes could meet. We may think of all the obstacles, what what are the odds that we’re still here and facing most of them? We don’t need to calculate every move, our minds were meant for chess and here we are stuck in a game of checkers. It’s simpler than it seems: use human warmth and kinship, a sense of wonder and curiosity, like those experienced early in our formation. How much kindness did we get from our loved ones? Did our parents hugged and kissed us often? I know mine did. Mother showered herself with me wrapped in an embrace, kind of incestuous, I know. But consider only that I stem from within her uterus and that should put the whole moral dilemma to rest. Most women cling to their young because that's what nature intended of them. Nature did not leave to chance the need we feel to protect our young. Everything from kindness to orgasms has a evolutionary predisposition. Women are drawn to their children but the sense of sacrifice, the loss of her best years, does not go unnoticed. In her dark moments, Mom would complain to her young that she could've had an easier life if she would've left us, like our father did. I reminded her soft-spokenly that it took her years to take us with her, but when it finally happened, she stuck out with us and any lover that came along knew her priorities. Everyone in her family denounced her for not "making things work" with dad, but she did try for years to see him settled down, years he spent in another land while she went from her mom's to her mother in law's house, until the humiliation and depravation got to her. Both paternal and maternal mother blamed her for the eventual breakup, not because either woman believed her to be, but because they were ancient relics of another time, chauvinistic at core. Their reasons for believing so differed: one woman believed her son had migrated to secure a better future for his family, arguing that he sent money frequently, money mother did not get because, after all, she lived in her husband's house. Mother's mom believed it was her fault, for having chosen so poorly, a man who was already self-involved.
Mother did make her partner's life miserable, I remember her chasing him around the house with a hot iron, not to throw at him but intent on burning him.
All because at five years old I had taken my tricicle for a ride from from one grandmother's house to the other, eighteen blocks apart, and when dad finally caught up to me, he reprimanded me harshly out of desperation and lifted his hand as if he were to hit me. Mom was enraged, even though dad had never and would never hit me in his life, perhaps because he wasn't around much it to begin with.
Women's love for their young is not without limits and always boarding on madness. You can see a woman give birth and understand that perhaps nature does after all play favorites. If it had been up to us to give birth, the specie would've long ago disappeared or anesthetic cesareans would've been invented millenniums in advance. Nowadays we find the roles inverted: women graduate in higher numbers and in salaries under one hundred grand, they make more money than men, still do not pay for dates and still live longer than men.
There are stay-at-home dads, men who either work from home and do all the chores traditionally adhered to women: cooking, cleaning, raising the kids, etc., meanwhile the woman puts food on the table. I haven't met many of these men, though. Recently, I met with an ex lover, told her I was out of work and though things had never been better for her financially, guess who paid for dinner?
Life's not easy for contemporary men. For eons, we were masters of the universe and then one day in the twentieth century feminism happened. Not only do we still get to play the role of the provider, but we get to pick up the tab of abuse and neglect women have endured since the dawn of time. Never has man been more of a man than he is today, yet the odds set against him have never been higher. Incarceration in astronomical numbers, born-poor die-poorer and younger than women, fighting wars no one cares for, expose to violence and humiliation without protections granted to others because of being men.
It's true, we descend from troglodytes. But shouldn't that be reason enough to cut men some slack? After all, how much self-improvement can we expect of them? I've outgrown the tendency to overpopulate the earth and aiming at bedding every last cute thingy that crossed my path. What I next propose is that men everywhere learn how to effectively deal with the inner vacuum and form substantial bonds. I believe that these men in positions of power did not make the time to get women. Powerful men link everything in life to the same formula of success: you get more when you have more.
And so, their whole lives they strive to make more and more until nothing is enough. Women have an ornamental value for some of these men. For others, it's all to do with the relationship that they had with their respective mothers. Some mothers made needy men and other turned them into psychopaths. What makes psychopaths especially sickening is that other people close to them do not even see their psychotic ways. In other words, psychopaths know how to pass off as normal, maybe even more so than the rest of us. Psychopaths are unable to feel empathy, to feel for others, and not all psychopaths are violent. Perhaps psychopaths evolved from unwanted children or children raised by uncaring mothers.
Children, especially boys, are drawn to their mothers, not just among humans but all throughout the mammal kingdom. Women complaint about their men but often cultivate in their boys the seeds that’ll one day sprout into a full-grown macho prototype. This maternal legacy of machismo is passed down generation after generation because the biggest fans of men being men is mothers letting their boys grow up to be just that, boys. Boys are conceived of as superior in most cultures throughout history, but males can be far more vulnerable than looks let on. Because of being larger, they may be less insulated by their mother’s womb. A huge stigma is placed on his masculinity, his peers will test his resolve, his parents will expect something, if anything. Friends, girlfriends, future wives, whatever social role we deem worth entertaining for the sake of following down the fateful road of matrimony.
Our parents did not fair out so well, and all statistics are dead-set up against us, but we figure why not give it a second try? If marriage were a product, it would never be as mainstream given its rap and not worth the investment. It’s more like a gamble made in a casino: sometimes someone gets lucky but most of the time it’s the house that wins it. But just because love is more like a gamble than it is a business (for those who own a lot more often is), it doesn’t mean you’re bound to lose at it. Even poker requires skills, and it is not the luckiest hand that wins it; oftentimes, it comes down to how well you play your hand and by “hand”, interjected, we mean “others”.
Here, in place of a “house” that wins most moves we make, we have a much better chance, if we play our hand right. In other words, playing others. Even if your game is elevated to the level of no-games, it still is part of the game and it’s the role you choose to play. It’s not for nothing that a person might adopt a “no-games, no-nonsense” mentality; it’s effective. Only losers rely on luck alone. But even when it looks like “luck” or what others may even call “a miracle”, it is often plainsightedly a natural phenomena. Peck Scott, in his self-improvement classic The Road Less Travel, dedicates a whole chapter about possible miracles. In one instance, he mentions how cars tend to be totalled completely and yet a lot of people survive. If Mr. Scott had known that car safety makes for modern cars to be designed in such a way that in the event of a crash, the blow is absorbed by the less compact front part of the vehicle that folds and screeches back, functioning like a bumper or a cushion. That the car looks destroyed beyond recognition and yet the person at the wheel gets to live to tell the story is nothing more than the triumph of modern engineering, possible by flexible minds, that apply logical solutions to everyday problems. We may choose to pray, but fortunately most of us find it more effective to deploy a tactical approach. It is a mechanism that works well when you’re dealing with a system ruled by well-defined algorithms. People, well… are on a whole ‘nother level. They’re not easy to make out at first, but if you pay close attention things will manifest themselves in time. Sort of like being in the dark and making out what hides there as we grow accustomed to the lack of light.
I may not have found the light, but I’m no longer afraid of the dark.
External lives dwell on the perception others may have of them, the way in which the ones that most matter will view them. Though it’s often downplayed, what others think of us may not be as easy as just letting go. It has some of that, of course. You can’t change others; it’s hard enough to change ourselves, and it’s futile thinking that we may persuade others into seeing things our way. If they happen to be uninteresting to us, leave them to themselves; if they strike our fancy, let them slide. We find forgiveness more appealing when it comes to people we love and cherish most. Why continue with this nonsense? We must put an end to this cruel game of pretense that’s eating us alive.
External people tie success to the achievement of a prestigious position, a title, a professional goal, or material wealth. Those with an external focus will rely on societal freedom to make good on their word regardless of the consequences. The law goes soft on them and so they act with more impunity. It makes the system money so it doesn't make sense to punish harshly those who infringe the rules for personal gains. If players are disciplined too hard, the logic tells us, it may dissuade others from taking chances themselves. Organized crime is big business. A lot of businesses started off illegally. The drive to turn in a profit make playing fair disadvantageous. The more aggressive tactics are enacted; in many respects, big businesses behave more like psychopaths. They do offer a good product but at what cost? Whatever the cost. That's an answer good for investors to hear; it's not so much so for the rest of us.
Of course, it's oversimplified, but the math is simple: you extend yourself.
You may not find many of them in the greatest of shape though some are quite
Others may sense an eye of the hurricane calm typical of a passive-aggressive storm brewing.
Whether it is business, romance,spiritual quests, etc. It's how denial works: we externalize the matter. “This sucks” sounds better than “I suck.” Taking responsibility is about taking charge. You have the option to shift the direction in which the boat steers. Instead of moping about it, do something about it. Initially it feels like a burden to confront a situation, to find common ground, to minimize tensions. But the more you wait, the worse things will get. We should do something that we are saying away from or denying ourselves.
If fear is all that's holding you back, then you're a coward.
It takes more resources to keep up with useless resentments; that's how life turns into a continuous drama. To minimize drama, the needless drive to theatrical malabarism, often masking itself in the heat-of-the-moment when in retrospect it's been brewing inside for a while now. It's the way we've seen others do that we follow the norm. We're a highly social creature and our success relies on collaborating effectively in massive numbers. Counterintuitively, we do care a great deal what others think of us, what do they say about us when we turn our backs? What is their real essence when they speak in monosyllabic and laconic terms as the cool kids do nowadays.
A heightened emotional state is more contagious than the common cold. I haven't got the cold in no less than a decade. But it's common to find myself vexed and irritated from time to time with other people's stupidities. Low energy people will suck the life out and one way they aim to achieve this is antagonizing us. It's best to avoid them like the plague, to be brief and cordial in our dealings with them. It's not their fault but if someone is infected with anger madness it could easily spread. Keep your distance, be discreet so as not to provoke the beast and use discretion and courtesy. The way we deal with strangers who exhibit signs of sickness. We stay away and let those more qualified to deal with their shitty ways. Dramatic people will always find the opportunity, or make it if necessary, to devise the full-scale infrastructure of misery. I see selfishness in the mirror staring back at me. Perhaps mirrors reflect the one we are in a not-so-distant universe. Either way, the image we see is not the one we are but the ones we were a fraction of a second ago. We should know only madmen immerse themselves in the present. We may find peace the more we do the things that regenerate ourselves.
Grow thicker skin and make sharper tools.
There's no present and there's no silence. There's no solace either, just an ever increasing anxiety that finds release in meditation, exercise and nutrition.
We live in a pervasive fleeting moment that turns to past and pours unto oblivion all the tiny illusory shreds of fantasies that seduce us at every turn. In all of these delicacies and intricacies, we find what's wrong with the picture and focus on petty things. We turn on each other to prove who's the most vicious. I always come out uneschathed. I don't start fights; I end them. The best victory is psychological warfare in which the conqueror subdues its adversary without a single shot fired. We're not who we think we are so long as we keep on with this charade.
You can't escape drama, sooner or later it will turn out and seduce you. You know them because of how they always gravitate towards an emotional vortex that sucks the life out of all of us. If anything, let's stay away from those who seem infected with the propensity to make matters worse, all in the name of their ego. Again, a healthy dose of ego goes a long way. Too much of it gets in your way.
All things considered, even the mere act of writing which fills me with a sense of pride that I am finally doing what I said I would, the satisfaction of conveying inner quests into outspoken posts. It has an element of drama. And that's okay.
A bit of spice is what makes life tolerable. We ought to make mistakes, to do the opposite of what we preach. We can be stupid. And we often are. That's why we must forgive others’ stupidities: not because they deserve it but because we all tend to be so. Some, more than others.
Another thing is staying away from angry people. Extricate them from your life and even if you find yourself under their same roof, you can go about your way and be as if they were infirmities apart. We scare easily.
Courage is rare and yet it is what's most needed. It's not as hard as it seems. Since most people tend to be submissive, that is where dominance lies. You know your domain and understand that being agreeable and laconic will get you out of the way of cold people.
There are four kind of people. Cold people, cool people, warm and hot respectively people..
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